2011 Social Media Marketing Awards: Integrated (Tech)

Program: EMC's mega launch Why we chose it: You don't find many campaigns that are this multidimensional. From influencer relations to promotional mailings to live events to YouTube, the EMC campaign used almost every channel at its disposal. The theme of “Breaking records” was carried through a direct mail puzzle with a corresponding interactive game on Facebook. Virtual simulcasts were supported by videos featuring storage-related Guinness World Records that EMC broke. A Breaking Records Tour traveled to more than 50 cities. The 250,000-member customer community held an open, live Q&A session with engineers. There was even an interactive on-line game just for employees. And the results were impressive: More than 700,000 views on YouTube, more than 40 posts by influential bloggers, 2,500 partici-pants in the community event and more than 1,500 tweets, which helped the #EMCBreaksRecords hash tag briefly break into the top trending topics on Twitter. The total Face-book fan base more than doubled in two weeks. An impressive 28% of all traffic to the event registration page originated from social media sites and/or social media engagement.

Runner-up: Cisco Systems

Program: The Cisco IPv6 integrated social media campaign Why we chose it: Cisco Systems has thrown the weight of its impressive marketing operation squarely behind online video, and its social activities demonstrate that the company walks the walk. The IPv6 campaign was intended to show how Cisco's service-provider clients can address customers' problems transitioning from an earlier version of the Internet protocol that is rapidly running out of address space to the new IPv6 standard. The video portion of the campaign centered upon a satirical YouTube video (“IPv6: Are You Ready?”) with a “Sky is falling” theme and featuring a unique twist: Viewers could select the ending and see how the story played out. There were also topical blogs, an ongoing Facebook conversation in the page for Cisco's myPlanNet (winner in the Integrated [Tech] category of last year's BtoB Social Media Awards), Twitter account and LinkedIn group. Cisco's customer-only support forums were also used to engage in a direct dialogue with (and between) customers. A rewards program encouraged customers to spread awareness to their colleagues. There was even a game that challenged the service-provider community to guess the date IPv4 addresses run out. Results: The video logged more than 50,000 views in the first three months, exceeding its goal by 400%. Related topics on the blog received more than 120,000 views. For a campaign focused on raising awareness, those aren't small numbers.